


come on courage, teach me to be shy

by folignos



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Canon Compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-19
Updated: 2012-05-19
Packaged: 2017-11-05 15:54:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/408252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/folignos/pseuds/folignos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"She’s running a hand, feather light, over his back when she finds the dimple, the white starburst of scarred skin just above the curve of his ass, half hidden by the sheet gathered there.  He shifts his weight a little bit, but otherwise doesn’t move, lets her pass over it once, twice, three times. ‘I don’t remember this,’ she says quietly."<br/>A story of scars, and how they become part of us over time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	come on courage, teach me to be shy

**Author's Note:**

> Written mostly for Rosemary, because she's fab, and helped with the planning.  
> Also, I'm gonna go ahead and warn for spoilers for the film.  
> The title is from Cannonball, by Damien Rice (subsequently murdered by the X Factor)

She’s running a hand, feather light, over his back when she finds the dimple, the white starburst of scarred skin just above the curve of his ass, half hidden by the sheet gathered there.  He shifts his weight a little bit, but otherwise doesn’t move, lets her pass over it once, twice, three times. ‘I don’t remember this,’ she says quietly. They’re alone in the dark, a hotel half a world away from the mansion, where no one knows their names or faces, but she almost whispers the words, isn’t really sure why. Maybe she doesn’t want to startle him, because he’s relaxed now, but he’s so flighty most of the time, looks like he’s ready to take off and soar, because his eyesight isn’t the only thing that gave him his code name. His muscles are always tense, and this is the first time he’s let her get close enough to feel the knots down his back, across his shoulders. He’s so tightly wound, more so than Natasha. She wonders how he manages to joke, be the asshole that everyone needs him to be when he’s practically shaking apart with tension.

‘Munich, ’99,’ he mumbles, one eye flickering open, and she remembers asking the question she thought he hadn’t heard. ‘Wasn’t fast enough. They didn’t get a chance to get another shot off.’ He smirks, eye sliding shut again as he shifts in the bed again, dislodging her hand before he rolls over onto his back and his eyes open properly. He smiles up at her, lopsided, hair sticking up at odd angles ‘Your turn,’ he says, voice thick with sleep, even though she knows he hasn’t been sleeping. His eyes are focused on her though, make her feel even more naked, like he can see through the sheet wrapped around her. She drops it, watches him smile slowly as his eyes slide downwards, and she picks up the hand that rests on her thigh and moves it round, until it’s just below her hip, and he can feel the tangle of scar tissue resting there.

He’s still looking up at her as his thumb brushes over it. ‘Tokyo, three years ago. He almost snuck up on me.’ She smirks, mirroring Clint’s earlier expression. ‘Didn’t live to regret it.’

He chuckles, before sitting up, the sheet pooling in his lap as he rubs at his hair ineffectually. She’s taken hold of his left hand, thumb resting on the pulse point as her fingers press into his palm, and she finds more bumpy skin, white and obtrusive, in a jagged line right across the middle of his palm, obviously wasn’t cleaned or stitched properly. His life line is cut right in two. She brings it to her mouth, and presses her lips against it. He flinches, just barely but it’s there, and she freezes, looking through her lashes at him. He’s sitting stock still. She doesn’t even know if he’s breathing. They sit and watch each other for maybe a minute before he breathes again, blinks, and she lowers the hand, but keeps it in her lap. ‘Worse than Munich?’ she asks, almost breathing the words out, and he nods.

‘I was twelve. It was the first time I ran away. I made it maybe fifty yards before I ran into this fence, thought I could climb it. I’d seen it in the movies, y’know? I got to the top, and split my hand open on the barbed wire at the top. I fought through the pain, made it to the other side, and the cops were waiting round the next corner. Took me to hospital, got me stitched up, and took me back to that place.’ He licks his lips, takes a shallow breath. ‘I didn’t try again after the first time. Barney got the worst of it, but…’ he trails off. ‘They ripped the stitches straight out, to begin with, but that was nothing to Barney. He couldn’t walk for a week.’ He takes another breath. She pretends not to hear the shake in it, lifting his hand up to the back of her head, through the hair so he can feel the uneven ripple there, just as the base of her skull. He moves forward as she pulls, until they’re face to face, inches away from each other. It’s dark, but she can just see his eyes, blue-grey and stormy, hard. He has the eyes of a SHIELD agent, she realises. Wonders if her eyes have that same glint. His fingers are calloused but smooth on the scar hidden by her hair. It’s when he’s looking at her that she realises what he’s just shared, what she’s about to share. She’s worked with him for eight years, been sleeping with him for two, and she’s never been with him like this, spoken to him like this. It feels oddly, she pauses, thinking. The word she was looking for escapes her, and she thinks domestic, and intimate, and worst of all, she thinks nice, even though there’s nothing nice about it, about sharing secrets like this. She feels faintly disgusted at herself, and realises he’s still looking at her, in that unnerving, unblinking way he has.

‘My stepfather.’ She says finally, and wonders if it’s possible for her voice to get any quieter, if she’ll just end up mouthing her words eventually. ‘He threw me across the room. I was seven.’

The glint in his eyes melts away, and they share a look, a look that she’s shared exactly twice on her life. Once with Stark, of all people, when he was drunk, and she was run into the ground, and he told her about his father, how he was a nice enough guy, but he just wasn’t there, not when it was important. Natasha can relate. Her mother was there afterwards, in the hospital when she woke up. She was also there when he threw her, sat in the armchair across the room, reading and pretending her new husband wasn’t the piece of shit he proved himself to be time and time again. She ignored the proof time and time again, and eventually Natasha got old enough to take care of herself. The first name in her ledger, written in scarlet. The second time she shared the same look, she killed the man who was looking at her, and by then she has so much red in her ledger she can’t keep track of it. It smells of rust and salt, and guilt, and sometimes she can’t bear it. Pressure on her forehead makes her refocus, and Clint is still looking at her, pressing his forehead against hers and he’s looking at her like she’s broken. Maybe she is. ‘Oh, Tasha,’ he sighs, and she pretends the nickname, something no one else ever calls her, doesn’t make her want to wind herself around this man, just as broken as she is, and never let him go. She leans forward, tilting, and brushes her lips across his, slides into his lap and places a hand on his face, thumb curled over his jaw. He smiles, a genuine one, not a smirk this time, and he drops his hand from the back of her head and holds his hand, palm up, so she can see it in the little light that they have. She suddenly understands the smoothness of his fingers on her body. He has no finger prints, instead there’s just flat white skin. It looks almost dead, lifeless and she holds his hand like he’s already a corpse, presses her thumb into the palm and curls her fingers around it. ‘Brazil.’

He says it quietly, almost as quiet as her, and she understands. They were both in Brazil, kept in separate rooms. She never once heard him scream. She can’t say the same about herself. She uncurls from her seat, stretches her leg out until it reaches a pool of light. She hears a sharp intake of breath, and it’s morbidly funny. She thought he was impossible to shock. Her right foot is curled, crooked where toes were broken and not set properly. Her smallest two toes are missing completely, something she’s had to work hard to compensate for when fighting. Balance is everything, and missing or crippled toes means she’s had to readjust almost every aspect of her hand to hand combat. He shifts in the bed and reaches out for her foot, almost reverent, she thinks, even though neither of them are religious. He turns, sits cross legged so her foot is in his lap and lifts it, as if to run his thumbs across the sole, but he flinches away as he touches it, automatic, and she doesn’t blame him, but she can see the shame in his eyes. Hawkeye doesn’t flinch, she knows that, Hawkeye is as coldblooded as she is, but the difference is, she knows, that Hawkeye is a different man to Clint. Clint is allowed to flinch without shame, he’s only human. She doesn’t think he knows that. She wishes he did.

She knows why he flinches though. It’s the craggy uneven skin on the sole of her foot. It’s the same on the other, white patches where blisters formed over and over again when they pressed glowing hot sheets of metal to the soles of her feet. It stopped hurting eventually, when all the nerve endings in her feet were seared shut. That’s when she knew she was in trouble. If Coulson hadn’t arrived with all the king’s horses and all the king’s men right then, she would have talked, she knows she would have. The single most embarrassing moment of her career [if you can call being one half of a secret government agency’s assassin team for hire a career. She supposes it pays the bills.].

‘Brazil.’ Clint says again, the same tone as before. She nods. She’d vanished into the woodwork after, as soon as she woke up in the hospital afterwards. She knew he’d still been in surgery for the punctured lung they’d given him, so she talked Coulson into letting her go, and he transferred her to a hospital in Chicago before losing the paperwork. She knows Chicago. It’s the closest she’ll ever get to liking a city. She was there for a year before she came back to SHIELD, with a different fighting stance and an imperceptible limp. Clint had dropped everything when he heard she was back, held her tight enough to make it hard to breathe, but they were both laughing and it felt like what Natasha always imagined home to be.

Clint shifts again, stretching a leg out to mirror hers, and she can’t shake the thought that he’s moving around her, almost as if he’s trying to keep his distance, despite spending most of the night tangled up in each other, sweat sheened skin sticking to sweat sheened skin, close enough to feel his heart beating, close enough to hear her breathing. He thinks she’s dangerous, she knows.

She is dangerous, but he’s never seemed to care before, and then she realises it’s not because she’s dangerous. It’s because it’s finally dawned on him that she’s breakable. He’s talking in the same low voice as before, sounds slightly hoarse as he lights a cigarette and inhales deeply before passing it to her. It’s almost a ritual now, sharing a cigarette in the morning, before they dress and leave separately, ready to pick up ledgers and red biros, one that he’d almost forgotten. She blows a smoke ring as he twists his foot around, points to an almost perfect circle on the sole of his own foot, the same white as the scars on his fingertips, and then twists it back to show her the matching circle on the top of his foot, smiling lopsidedly. It’s a blatant change of subject, and he was never subtle, but she’s grateful anyway, passes the cigarette back after flicking ash off the end. ‘I was seventeen, and showing off. Everyone else in the circus could do all kinds of fancy tricks, so I thought I should too. Shot myself in the foot. Most embarrassing day of my life. You have no idea. I thought Barney was going to explode with laughter. Trick Shot was pissed. I couldn’t work in his act for almost a month, couldn’t walk without help for two weeks.’

She’s not sure why he’s telling her this. The confusion must have shown on her face, because he nudged her shoulder with his. ‘At least all your battle scars are what they are. Half of mine are because I was a smartass with a big mouth, or a huge ego.’ He’s trying to make her feel better. She appreciates that more than she can say. He slings an arm around her shoulder, thumb rubbing her collarbone where her tattoo is, _never surrender_ written in slanted Russian. She turns into him, curls around him again and kisses him, bracing herself with a hand on his abdomen, deliberately over the small scar there from the appendectomy a couple of months ago. He’d passed out on an op when it burst, and only Coulson’s reflexes, faster even than Natasha’s, had saved his life. They both owe a lot to Phil Coulson.

‘I miss him,’ she says, lips mouthing at the crease where his neck and shoulder meet, surprising herself with her words.

Clint stills underneath her, face buried in her hair. She pulls back, looks him in the eye, makes sure he’s looking back at her. ‘You’re allowed to miss him too, Clint.’

‘Tasha, I-’ she interrupts him, places a finger on his lips.

‘You didn’t kill him. It wasn’t you.’ She leans closer again, kisses him, says against his lips ‘It wasn’t you.’ She doesn’t think she’s imagining it when he relaxes slightly, curves his hands, so much bigger than hers, around her hips.


End file.
